Universal apps, introduced back in April by Microsoft, a great way for developers to create apps for all systems. You can run Universal apps on Windows, Windows Desktop, Windows Phone and probably Microsoft will open it up in the future so that it’ll be possible too to use those apps on an Xbox or even on wearables. There’s a lot of potential in this idea, and Microsoft already made a solid foundation.

In this series we’re going to create a Universal app for The Developer Source. At the end we want to have a solid first-version TDS-app! And you’ll learn how it works 🙂

We’re going to start simple. First we’ll create a new Universal C# app with Visual Studio. In case you don’t have Visual Studio installed, you’ll learn here how to install Visual Studio.

Once you successfully installed Visual Studio we can start with the project. To start I’m going to create a new universal app project. To do this select ‘New Project’ on your Visual Studio start page and now select C# Universal Apps in the left pane and choose ‘Hub App’ in the right pane. This will provide us with a basic template where we can build our app on. I’m naming my project TUDS (The Universal Developer Source) you can name it however you want.

Now click on ‘OK’ and your project will be created.

In the Solution Explorer you’ll now be able to see all namespaces that are created. One for Windows 8.1, one for Windows Phone 8.1 and a shared one. TUDS.Shared will be used to write code that can be used on both Windows and Windows Phone. The other two will be used to write device-specific code.

If you can’t see the Solution Explorer window, go to View > Solution Explorer.

That’s about it for the first tutorial in this series. See you in the next one where we’ll start coding!